KDE.news 

It's time for a bag of quickies focusing on application news. Shawn Gordon informs us that theKompany.com has moved Kivio to KDE CVS as part of the KOffice package. This is a great addition to the KOffice suite. theKompany also recently released version 2 of KDEStudio, an integrated development environment for KDE. Hans Dijkema tells us that KMailCvt is now part of the kdenetwork package. Finally, Kaim 0.50 has been released, the first stable release of the Instant Messenger client. Read More

Kurt Granroth has taken the plunge and compiled KDE and X with a number of the cutting-edge extensions which Keith Packard has been working on. The result of hours of compiling and following a few simple instructions: a fully anti-aliased KDE session, with a screenshot to show how it looks. It's not production-quality yet, but it's darn close! His report follows. Read More

Our friend Simon Hausmann wrote in with some exciting news about KDE's excellent browser Konqueror: it's been ported to Qt/Embedded. He says: "I just uploaded a first version of a port of the Konqueror webbrowser to Qt/Embedded, Konqueror/Embedded. The project aims to build a feature complete version of the webbrowsing component of Konqueror for Qt/Embedded, including support for SSL, Cookies, Javascript, non-blocking IO, HTML4/CSS, etc." Way to go, Simon! Simon has only been able to test this port on a virtual framebuffer -- if you can donate a Qt/Embedded-enabled palmtop device for Simon to perfect his work, please contact him! Read More

Keith Packard, member of the XFree86 Core Team and author of the highly anticipated Render extension for X, posted an exciting screenshot Sunday to kde-devel: Konqueror displaying kde.org using antialiased text! Unfortunately the code is not ready for general use, but Keith offered a rough patch for Qt to set things in motion. Matthias Ettrich (along with many other enthusiastic core developers) expressed interest, and mentioned Keith's code may be included as soon as Qt version 2.2.3. You can read the full discussion on kde-devel, starting with Keith's initial announcement, here. Read More

The KDE Team has just announced the release of KDE 2.0.1. While the release is primarily for updated translations and documentation and for the addition of Japanese as a supported language, it also fixes many of the very annoying bugs in 2.0. A summary of the fixes and a KDE 2.0.1 Info Page are also available. As always, enjoy! Read More

In the latest installment of The People Behind KDE, Tink brings us an interview with Matthias Elter, release coordinator for KDE2.0 and everyone's favorite kicker hacker. "I got involved with KDE after reading the "call for help" c't article on KDE AlphaI written by Kalle in 1997. It seems like a large number of todays core developers got attracted by that article. Thanks, Kalle!" Read More

Icon alpha-blending has taken some big steps forward today. First, Antonio Larrosa introduced alpha blending to the HEAD branch in CVS. Here's a screenshot showing one icon blended into another. A few hours later, Carsten Pfeiffer shot back with this tasty screenshot of Konqueror previewing text files with the mimetype icon blended in. Oh, I can't wait for 2.1 -- time to hit CVS! (screenshots below) Read More

Chris Schlaeger is this week's guest at the popular People section of KDE's web site. Tink asks Chris about his work on KDE and on the KDE League, about his near ones and much more. Tink has also put a new lovely presentation on her section. Go take a look. Read More

The KDE Release Dude has posted updated release schedules for KDE 2.0.1, a bug-fix and translation release due out next week, and KDE 2.1, which will provide new functionality and improvements in many areas of KDE. The first beta of KDE 2.1 is due out in three weeks. Niels Træholt Frnack wrote in to tell us that KAlliance has released Milestone 1 of Magellan, a very promising PIM client (the website seems to be a bit broken); some mouth-watering (but large) screenshots are available here. Rik Hemsley has put up an article explaining how one can use multithreading in a KDE or Qt program and why the KDE libs don't use threading. Daniel Molkentin wrote in that KDE-EDU mailing list, which aims to help people that want to bring KDE into schools or to develop educational software, has been reopened. Finally, BSD Today has publishd a quite favorable review of our favorite browser, Konqueror. Read More

A new KDE 2 porting mailing list has been set up to help KDE 1 application authors port their software to the new APIs. Please subscribe if you are interested in porting your KDE 1 application to KDE 2 or if you want to help others with porting their applications. To subscribe visit http://master.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde2-porting or send a mail with "subscribe your-email-address" in the subject of the message to kde2-porting-request@kde.org. A KDE2 porting FAQ based on questions submitted to this mailing list will hopefully be available soon, too. Read More